I am going to use the following method from Spring Data Kotlin extensions:
inline fun <reified T : Any> MongoOperations.bulkOps(bulkMode: BulkMode, collectionName: String? = null): BulkOperations
The question is: can I somehow avoid specifying T
assuming I do not want to provide entity class name (that's because I will explicitly specify collectionName
, and in this case class type can be null
). I would like to type something like:
val ops = mongoTemplate.bulkOps<null>(BulkOperations.BulkMode.UNORDERED, collectionName = "i_know_better")
Is there a type literal for null
with which I can parameterize bulkOps
?
CodePudding user response:
I think the short answer is no.
You seem to confuse types with values. null
is a value and not a type so it cannot be used as a type in generic methods.
In your specific example, even if you could use null, looking at the code what would you expect to happen?
@Suppress("EXTENSION_SHADOWED_BY_MEMBER")
inline fun <reified T : Any> MongoOperations.bulkOps(bulkMode: BulkMode, collectionName: String? = null): BulkOperations =
if (collectionName != null) bulkOps(bulkMode, T::class.java, collectionName)
else bulkOps(bulkMode, T::class.java)
As you can see there's always T::class.java
being called. What would be the result of null::class.java
?
I'm unfamiliar with the Spring Data so I can't really provide an alternative, but I'd say you either need to search for another method or use an appropriate class here. The generic type is marked as T : Any
so presumably it can be any non-nullable type. I wonder if Unit
would work. Again, I'm not sure what this class is used for.
CodePudding user response:
To answer the question in general, you can use Nothing?
to represent the type that only contains the value null
.
That being said, as @Fred already said, the method you're considering here explicitly states T : Any
, meaning only non-nullable types are allowed. And it makes sense given that the function is accessing the class of T
.